The men were on one of the four boats that ferried Æthiopians to Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic...on Thursday, Mohammed Abdiker, director of operations and emergencies at the UN migration agency, tweeted on Friday.
Abdiker further said that the people on the boat were dumped into the sea and "forced to swim to shore" as they approached Yemen's Shabwa province from Somalia.
No bodies have been recovered.
IOM front man Joel Millman said nearly 600 Æthiopian refugees, men and women, were aboard the ships. The figure is an unusually large number of refugees to arrive off the Yemeni province at one time.
According to International Organization for Migration figures, some 87,000 people risked their lives trying to reach Yemen from the Horn of Africa by boat in 2017.
At least 30 African refugees drowned when their boat capsized off the coast of war-torn Yemen last month with reports that their smugglers opened fire on those on board.